Though I found it thorough and immensely helpful, I guess The Ultimate Zombie Survival Guide just wasn't enough. A new book called Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens has just been published that exhaustively maps out how the typical homeowner can achieve ultimate disaster preparedness. This manual wasn't written by some salty former Marine or wild Alaskan adventurer, it was written by a 56-year-old woman named Kathy Harrison from the small (and regrettably named) Western Mass town of Cummington. And she's kind of a nut!

Rock of Love, in which former Poison something-or-other Bret Michaels tries to find the love of his life among a bevy of obliterated old groupies, may be our most winningly repulsive reality show. And that's saying a lot, considering it's on VH1 which is also host to the grim parasite that is I Love Money. But the problem is that it's always been in Los Angeles-we'd have to send our blinded-by-bathtub-moonshine sisters and daughters (and wives) hobbling all the way across the country if we wanted to vicariously taste the salty-sweet thrills of the Bret Michaels Experience ("face time!") But, now, no longer! The next season will send Bret and his ladies hurtling across this great nation of ours in a tour bus, while he rocks out with his melted pencil eraser cock out. And they're casting in New York and Hoboken (founded, five hundred years ago, by hobo Ken.) The cattle call is below. I urge you to audition ladies. Your lives and livers will be forever changed.

Email: it's no longer cool! Was it ever? Apparently it was, so I hope you didn't miss your opportunity to use your inbox as a "gauge of Digital Age machismo." Because now email, like The Blob, has turned into a monster that threatens to swallow us all in its pulsating, gelatinous walls. The problem has spread from nerds to regular people, and America is now paying attention. The LA Times even quotes one nerd proclaiming "EMAIL shall henceforth be known as EFAIL." Dang! "All your time are belong to email," I imagine internet scientists saying. And they're more right than you know!: Experts have discovered that Americans no longer go to work to perform actual work; they simply go to work to send and receive email about what would happen if they theoretically were to do some work. When they're not doing this, they're mentally recovering:

Reporters are scrambling all over the place in LA right now to find out just what "went down" in the Great Shake Of '08! Newspapers are pulling first-hand accounts off Twitter! Websites are quoting other websites! But the LA Times is already taking ownership of the official reaction-angle to the disaster, by tracking down Southern California's most scaredy-cat government officers to describe exactly how they cowered in fear when the quake struck an hour ago:

This whole thing is almost too hideous and useless to report, but, again, there is no news. To use a Choire-ism, news dried up and blew away about a month ago. So in these sere times, I am forced to mention that Chris Crocker&mdashsobbing Britney Spears apologist and, like, half a tranny-has up and done quit the YouTube. That's it! Like Lodwick and Gessen before him, it's over! I mean, there is of course one last video (smeared across the white internet page after the jump) in which Ms. Crocks asks his "legion" of fans to take a "deep ass breath" (heh, ass breath) and bravely swallow the news that, though he is its biggest star in recorded history, he has decided to leave YouTube because... well, I don't know. It's not really clear. See if you can parse the video yourself. What's really important, though, is that he's launched his own website, affiliated with new and soon-to-fail social networking site ShareNow. In his inaugural blog post he writes, demurely: "Hide your momma's, your daddies, and most importantly- your boyfriends. My official site is almost ready to launch.. Kisses & Cumshots, Chris Crocker" So that's, um, gross and irksome. Good luck... you.

Rupert Murdoch and his deputy Robert Thomson are eager to get the Wall Street Journal's new magazine off the ground. The publication, WSJ., is to get the Journal in on a consumer-glossy bonanza that now nets the Times' T magazine $46 million in annual revenue and helped it grow 12 percent last year. Murdoch and Thomson are so keen on this concept that they're racing ahead with WSJ. even though it was conceived under the Journal's prior owners, the Bancrofts' Dow Jones. So convinced are the News Corp. executives of the magazine's future success that, the Observer reports in today's paper, they are making staff sign a "code of conduct" to ensure they will not be swayed by the inevitable mob of overeager advertisers. But to hear one reliable inside source tell it, WSJ. will be lucky to launch without embarrassing itself on the editorial side, to say nothing of selling ads.

Terrible, horrible, no good, very bad news everyone. The Hills is coming back. Soon. The fourth season of MTV's fake reality Chekhov-lite exploration of the listless, sun-drenched lives of a gaggle of dim witted Angelenos is premiering in mid August and, judging from a boy-filled online preview (after the jump), it seems just as dull, soul-crushing, and deliciously fucking awful as ever.

Tricia-Walsh Smith, who famously took to YouTube to humiliate her husband for allegedly deceiving her about his sex life, has seen many of the fears she aired in her videos come to pass — because she made the videos in the first place. A court ruled she must vacate her and her husband's Park Avenue apartment and settle for a lump-sum $750,000 alimony specified in a prenuptial agreement. Her husband, head of the Shubert Organization, has suffered heart problems as a result of her videos and had his reputation damaged, the judge ruled:

If you've ever watched The Hills and thought to yourself "these girls just aren't bitchy enough," well then you oughta be satisfied now. Lauren Conrad, star of MTV's odd sensation of a reality soap, was the star of a charity event last night that was all about being nice to puppies and stuff. She slouched down the red carpet holding a dog she didn't own, posed for pictures, all that googaw. At the end of the evening she was supposed to do some sort of catwalk thing with the little beast, but it never happened. Because she'd already stormed off in a huff, leaving the emcee of the event to say to the whole audience "those reality stars can be such temperamental bitches." It's a joke... about dogs... and about unpleasant women.

[First off, I apologize profusely for the headline above. That being said, here is performer and former homo sapien Michael Jackson being wheeled around Las Vegas yesterday. I hope he's not sick. If he is, though, I'm sure he'll beat it. Image via Insider]

Because the world has not yet suffered enough, a reality show about a hooker looking for love may soon be foisted upon us. When Ashley Alexandra Dupré was sadly diddling former New York governor Eliot Spitzer in a tony Manhattan hotel room, I'll bet she never imagined that one glorious day an outlet as prestigious as E! would report that she was getting a reality show of her very own. The alleged show, in which she may entertain a variety of potential suitors, would set in motion a plan that involves Dupré becoming "the next Tila Tequila," according to a source. And that, folks, really is it.

Remember how Vogue had everyone in a tizzy this spring over its covers? First there was the LeBron James/King Kong cover in April, then the horrific Photoshop job on Gwyneth Paltrow in May. For all the damage the disastrous fronts did to the fashion title and its editor Anna Wintour, one would have at least hoped for a slight circulation bump from all the publicity. Not so: Newsstand sales of the LeBron James issue were off 100,000 copies year-over-year to 350,000 while the Paltrow issue sold 45,000 fewer copies. Sad. [WWD]

You guys wanted to see a horrifying image of everything that is insidiously vapid and ideologically bankrupt about our country this afternoon, right? Oh good, because after the jump we have a YouTube video of a little girl, who is maybe six-years-old, singing the song "Fabulous" from High School Musical 2. In it the child gyrates and flashes her fancy threads and shrieks a lot. Its truly heinous nature is only amplified by the little note posted by the uploader: "So Disney encouraged kids to make their own video to one of four song clips from High School Musical. Jordyn chose fabulous, and made this clip. She has roughly 50 video song clips she is begging me to post, that I haven't had time to get to. So one down- 49 to go! ;-)" Watch and weep for our ruined nation after the jump.

When we noted (only reporters' reporter Kara Swisher reported it) that Yahoo president Sue Decker's last reorganization included promoting longtime Yahoo Ash Patel to head of a new Global Products group, probably the nicest comment came from therealsunnyvalequeen, who wrote: "Ash is a good technical leader, but cannot possibly do what they have now asked of him." BoomTown's Kara Swisher reports several Yahoo executives echo the sentiment. Apparently tone-deaf Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang does not.

Do you remember Alex McCord? Of course you do. She's the Real Housewives of New York City reality show star with the sorta-gay husband who likes to pose nude a lot. If she was one of your favorites on RHoNY, fear not. She and hubby Simon and their two poor bastard fake French children will be stomping around Boerum Hill for the show's second season. Never mind that the pair were painted as status-hungry buffoons on the first season; filming begins soon for the second, and Silex are excited:

No tech executive draws more bile and disdain than Ash Patel. So why is Yahoo president Sue Decker promoting him to fill the place of several departing executives? Let me keep it short and sweet: Decker is a charmless Wall Street type who's bad at managing people. Patel's main skill, one that has kept him at place in Yahoo for 12 years, is managing up. His second talent: making excuses for the fact that he's rarely seen on campus before 10:30. No one who's serious at Yahoo has any respect for Patel, and no one who's sensible cares to report to him. Decker's plan is succeeding in one regard: All the departures Patel's promotion is sparking will surely reduce costs.

So, sigh, The Love Guru. The Mike Myers-starring, Deepak Chopra-inspired "comedy" film — about an American-born, Indian-raised spiritual guru who travels back to the States to spread his message of peace, love, and weird unidentifiable accents — is opening tomorrow, and dark clouds are forming. The doomsayers began clucking when the cringe-inducingly unfunny trailer premiered this winter (during the Superbowl, was it?) and they've only gotten louder as the inexorable date (tomorrow!) draws closer. The unfunny clips, the badmouthing about Myers, the sheer presence of Jessica Alba. All signs point to this thing being a catastrophe on an epic scale.

Every big website in the world suckles at the teat of traffic like so many piglets fighting over a bloated sow. But figuring out the whims of the traffic gods is not as easy as you might think. If the oldest magazine in the world hasn't cracked the code yet (see the pitiful performance of the The Atlantic's Britney Spears cover), it's a lot to expect from the "new" media, even with all our fancy computerized counting machines. Sometimes it's out of your control; CNBC.com's chief just wrote that the business site's traffic took a dive yesterday when all of its golf-loving rich white guy readers turned away from their computers to watch Tiger Woods win the US Open. But there are some fairly reliable ways to build traffic successfully, which we will now reveal to you, after the jump. Is sex involved? Click now to find out!:

Tila Tequila, the diminutive star of MySpace and other useless things, ran her mouth to Us magazine recently (at the premiere of Mike Myers' The Love Guru, making this a truly star crossed occurrence) and said that she, she of the fake breasts and faker reality show, is to be thanked for the recent ruling in California to give up the ugly pursuit of banning gay marriage. "It is because of me — I definitely think [my show] has helped the movement," she told the magazine. You see her MTV reality show, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, is about one be-titted internet star (Ms. Tequila) trying to find love while boys and girls eat bugs and fart Mike's Hard Lemonade and kick ass and take a few names in hopes of impressing her. The show's frank (and stupidly fake) bisexuality, she claims, really opened some doors:

Hey kids 13-16! Do you like truffles? Do you make a mean osso buco or quick salad with radicchio and pancetta? Sure you do. All kids like food. Which is why Bravo, home to more reality shows than there are hours of programming in a day, is getting ready to start shooting Top Chef Junior, a cooking competition for epicurean, wine-swilling, back-stabbing teenagers.